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Category Archives: Lintop

After I installed and setup some apps on my Lintop system like the sysnergy-project I thought: “What the hell happens if this installations for any reason may be corrupted?” I would need to setup everything again. This means hours of work and sometimes you even can’t remember how exactly you configured an app to get it to work. A backup would be great, or?

So but how to backup and what to backup? I read the Ubuntu community post about backupYourSystem.

I came to the conclusion that I need:

an automated backup approach with as less manual interaction as possible

full backup of the whole disk

a backup into an image not a clone. So I save space and can have more than one backup

a solution which can be booted via USB

and for this I decided to used Clonezilla.

Environment:

Lintop with Ubuntu 14.04.2

USB Stick

Backup USB drive with 1 TB capacity

1. Prepare a backup USB drive

I connected the backup USB drive to Ubuntu and created one big partition with the pre-installed gnome disks tool “disks”. I created NTFS as file system. You can choose any file system Clonezilla is able to mount.

2. Create a bootable USB stick with Clonezilla

There is a nice tool called Tuxboot which creates everything you need. So lets install it first.

So what are we doing here?

This runs Clonezilla ocs-sr and use partclone (-q2) in first place to backup the device /dev/sda (Os disk in my case). -j2 means clone hidden data with dd, -z1p parallel gzip, sc skip the check, -p poweroff turns of the pc after the backup, savedisk means a whole disk, autoname generates a name for your backup image.

ocs_prerun=“mount /dev/sdb1 /home/partimag/“

This mounts the backup USB drive at /home/partimag which is a default location for the disk images used by ocs-sr.

3. Run the backup

In my environment I’ll do backups before i stop working in my home office. So I restart my Lintop machine, put in the USB drive and go sleep. Lintop boots from the USB stick and automatically starts the Clonezilla backup to the backup USB drive. When it is finished it powers off.

On top of my desk there are to PC systems right now. A Windows 8.1 box which is capable to run “apps” in full screen mode 🙂 and the Lintop Ubuntu box. I searched for a solution which enables me to use just one keyboard/mouse but control both screens. I found the Synergy project. This is really a cool solution and worth the few dollars.

In the last days I thought about which OS I would like to install on Lintop. My main desktop is Windows 8.1 so I decided to use Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS desktop version. For sure there are a lot of distributions which could do the job and my decision is based on the following requirements: